Pentagram has created a bespoke brand font for Resonate, an international festival that explores music, visual arts and digital arts in Belgrade, Serbia.

The font is part of the visual identity that the Pentagram team created for the festival, which was launched in 2015. Resonate is a platform for networking, knowledge sharing and education. To reflect this collaborative spirit, Pentagram has created a bespoke grid, font and glyph system for the festival, which will be adapted each year to create a refreshed but consistent identity.

The first expression of the system was for Resonate’s 2015 Festival, where Pentagram used it to create a cellular automaton. This system has been reinvented with glyphs becoming loose and flexible pieces of ribbon.

Several glyphs in the font reference Paul Renner’s initial design of Futura, before it was simplified for commercial release. The Pentagram team did not intend the resemblance, but after noticing the system they were working with would create glyphs with similarities to Futura, they decided to actively embrace it.

The font’s serendipitous similarity to Futura connects it to Bauhaus, a movement which believed that design should look towards the future, mirroring Resonate's main purpose. The Bauhaus belief that form should follow function also inspired the creation of the font. Although the font may look like an odd sea of shapes, it is dictated by its function of being a flexible and collaborative tool that is distinct enough to clearly belong to Resonate, no matter how it is arranged.